Bogeymen
by Nagia
Summary: Vincent, Yuffie. The monsters under her bed and why she never ran away. Burnt Offerings universe.


**Bogeymen  
**

* * *

i;

The castle is old and black and crumbling and he cannot think how the child would have entered. She is familiar, with her bird-boned frame and wide gray eyes. He looks up and through his hunger he sees what once was. What might be, if she lives long enough (and that is in question; he is a tribute gift from one darkness to another and a third darkness looms in the not-so-distant future). She cannot be six years old but he sees her at sixteen.

"Who're _you_?" she asks in her sticky-sweet voice. If she lives ten years, that voice will change.

She is as he has never seen her before. In one sense, she is completely unique, a new-minted thing. In the only sense that matters, he knows her.

"I'm a monster."

He knows her (knew her, Vincent Valentine knew her) too well to be surprised when she laughs at him.

* * *

ii;

The thing Kisaragi Kouhei likes most about her hands is that they chase away her daughter's fears. Soon they will have everything to fear, but those days haven't arrived yet. Kouhei does not yet know that she will end her days in a welter of ink and gore and betrayal. Even when her end is clear to her, she will accept it with hard grey eyes and sharp knives, will stand in death's grasp that others may escape it, and will never think to ask why. Kouhei is not entirely sane.

But for now, the Heartless are an anceint story. Nothing more than cradle scare tactics. Something to frighten your children with, though she never uses the story of the Heartless against her own child.

The eternal war between Radiant Garden and Maleficent is the only threat. The violent, destructive sorceress is fear enough. What that mad witch might do in the darkness of her crumbling castle, what gifts she might receive, what enigmas she might send Radiant Garden's eccentric, brilliant, king... These are worries for other people.

Kouhei will learn that some scare tactics work for a reason.

* * *

iii;

"Mama, there's a monster under my bed," little Yuffie whimpers.

Kouhei runs her fingertips along her daughter's face. "Oh, is there?"

At her mother's touch, Yuffie draws herself up a little taller, a little prouder, a little braver. Her eyes may not be as hard as her mother's, her hands not as strong, her nature not as violent, but she has the pride and strength of the Kisaragi, even in her childhood. By the time she is sixteen, she will have shed the cotton of childhood, have done away with the silk of womanhood. Like her mother, she will be a naked blade.

But she isn't there yet.

"And what does this monster look like?"

"It's got red eyes," Yuffie says firmly, with all the expertise a six year old can muster. "And yellow claws."

Kouhei draws her hands through her daughter's soft hair. Her nails scratch lightly, lightly at the skin on Yuffie's scalp as she strokes her child's head. The feel of that short hair underneath her hands, soft as wisps of silk, is one of her few pleasures.

"Sounds like a very scary monster," she says, voice soft. "But red eyes don't see very well in the dark and gold claws are soft and break easily."

"He can't hurt me?"

So Kouhei kisses her daughter on the forehead, reveling in the smooth flesh, the clean scent of soap. The faint smell of peaches from the portion of dessert that inevitably wound up in Yuffie's hair. "Kisaragi women are made of steel. No blind monster with soft claws will ever hurt us."

The woman who might, once, have been from Wutai unsheaths a tiny knife from a place Yuffie won't be able to hide things in until she's sixteen. In the darkness of Yuffie's bedroom, painted in shades of blue and green with accents in yellow, the knife doesn't even glint.

"Take this," she says, "and get down there. Real ninjas show monsters who's boss."

* * *

iv;

The castle is old and black and crumbling and he cannot think why the teen hasn't run away from him yet.

"You know this place pretty well," Yuffie drawls, eighteen years old, two years older than the girl he thought he saw, one year younger than the girl he remembers. But he cannot imagine her any older. The sight of her face, identical to the one he knew so long ago, still hurts him. Still brings back memories.

"I was Maleficent's monster," he admits.

At her laugh, he remembers both the girl who told him that gold claws were soft and red eyes were blind, and the ninja who told him that his suffering at the hands of Hojo was boring story number one.

* * *

END


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